Here’s How Stolen American Cars Reportedly End Up Overseas

The face of the stolen car game seems to be changing. While it’s still common for pilfered rides to be chopped up for spare parts, used in other crimes, or given fraudulent vehicle identification numbers and sold to unsuspecting buyers, recent reports claim that significant quantities of stolen cars are ending up overseas, often registered in countries stretched thin enough to turn a blind eye.

Since 2020, the number of vehicles stolen each year in America has been on the upswing, with the National Insurance Crime Bureau reporting that 1,020,729 vehicles were stolen in 2023. To be precise, that’s a 28.55 percent increase since 2019, and theft rates vary significantly by region. In 2023, DC topped the per-capita list, with 1,149.71 vehicles stolen per 100,000 people. While trends like stealing non-immobilized Kias with USB cables undoubtedly contributed significantly to this increase, a noteworthy proportion of those stolen cars were actually illegally exported.

As Bloomberg reports, “About 10% of the cars stolen in the US today are smuggled overseas, according to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which runs a New Jersey-based task force that integrates the efforts of local and federal law enforcement and coordinates crackdowns up and down the East Coast.”

In these cases, one a thief steals a car, it gets turned over to a middleman, who facilitates the export of the vehicle. It’s a brazen activity, with Bloomberg reporting that some of these middlemen even take orders for vehicles based on what dealers on the other end want. Along with popular mainstream crossovers, high-end luxury vehicles are also frequently targeted for export, with vehicles like the Range Rover and BMW X6 having outsized theft rates for model years 2020 through 2022, according to the Highway Loss Data Institute.

So how are thieves getting their hands on these vehicles? As we previously reported when car theft in Canada had grown intense enough to create global buzz, a variety of methods are used. Relay attacks, where thieves manipulate smart key signals to trick cars into thinking their proximity key fobs are nearby, and CAN injections, where thieves use devices to manipulate a vehicle’s onboard electronics, are recent theft techniques, but the former requires a conveniently placed fob and the latter may result in vehicle damage from accessing CAN lines. As a result, thieves have been resorting to more classic techniques, namely crimes of opportunity like hopping in an idling but unoccupied vehicle, and violence like carjacking.

In July, an armed 18-year-old suspect allegedly tried to carjack a vehicle driven by part of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s security detail while the marshals were on the job. Back in December 2023, a 17-year-old suspect was charged with armed carjacking after an off-duty FBI agent was reportedly targeted. While early Council on Criminal Justice data suggests that carjacking incidents in 2024 were down nationwide by 26 percent over 2023, rates of car theft including carjacking still sit comfortably above 2023 levels.

In the case of carjackings, the criminal on the other side of the gun has a solid chance of being a teenager. As Council on Criminal Justice senior researcher Ernesto Lopez told NPR in December, “Compared to motor vehicle theft and robbery, juveniles do commit a higher rate of carjacking compared to those other offenses. So it’s not a uniquely juvenile phenomenon when you compare it to adults, but within the sphere of juvenile offending, it does appear to be pretty high.”

We’ve seen this trend hit with a vengeance in Canada, with stolen vehicles flowing through the Port of Montreal to other global regions. Nearly a year ago, the Canadian Border Services Agency announced that it had seized 598 stolen cars from shipping containers waiting to be exported from the Port of Montreal between Dec. 2023 and April 2024, many of which came from the Greater Toronto Area. As CTV News reports, Ontario Provincial Police stated that some of these vehicles were stolen through violent means, whether carjacking or home invasions.

However, compared to the number of incoming containers inspected for illicit goods, relatively few containers for export are scanned. That Canadian bust came from a closer look into just 398 containers, and it’s a similar story in America. With thousands of shipping containers being exported every single day, not every one gets checked, and this inspection gap keeps the overseas stolen car trade flowing. So where are all these stolen cars going? Well, although smaller markets for ill-gotten high-end luxury cars exist in places like Dubai, many stolen and exported cars end up in Africa. As Bloomberg reports:

When stolen vehicles hit the streets there, overstretched local government agencies are unlikely to investigate if one on the road is legal, illegal or of dubious provenance, says Eleanor Beevor, senior researcher at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Beevor conducted a 2022 investigation of the stolen-car trade in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger—countries where military coups took place in 2021, 2022 and 2023, respectively. “If you are trying to run security for a particular town, you are not going to expend much energy running checks on making sure vehicles weren’t stolen thousands of miles away,” she says. “Conflicts have made it even less of a priority than it already was.”

While recent coups make clamping down on stolen vehicles in those nations more challenging, they aren’t the only regions in Africa to see significant quantities of stolen North American cars being sold as legitimate imports. In 2023, CBC News found multiple cars that were reported stolen in Canada yet living life in Ghana, and reported that some of them even still had their Canadian licence plates.

Beyond some of these vehicles being stolen through violent means, these stolen cars go on to fund further criminal activity. As Bloomberg reports:

“Vehicle crime isn’t just about stolen cars,” says Valdecy Urquiza, secretary general for Interpol. “It’s about something far more complex, far more dangerous. It’s about organized crime using those stolen vehicles and parts as currency to fuel a network of illegal activities—from drug trafficking to human smuggling, from the arms trade to acts of terror.”

Let’s expand on that last point. There may be more to this than proceeds from stolen vehicles funding organized crime, as some stolen and exported vehicles are reportedly used by insurgents. As Bloomberg reports, militant groups in Central Sahel have an affinity for American full-sized pickup trucks as technicals. You know, trucks with heavy weapons on the back. I’m certainly questioning how common this is considering Toyota pickup trucks are more popularly used by militant groups and the handful of photos I’ve seen of F-150s with guns on them trace back to Mexico, but it seems at least somewhat plausible.

While overall car thefts seem to be coming down, no doubt in part due to Hyundai and Kia rolling out an immobilizer patch for their entry level vehicles of the past decade or so, criminal organizations fraudulently exporting stolen cars is something that needs to be fixed. It’s a hard problem to tackle, given that scanning more shipping containers for export will require equipment upgrades and new processes, but it’s not an insurmountable issue.

(Lead photo credit: Land Rover)

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